The present invention generally relates to vehicle monitoring and vehicle information management methods and systems. More specifically, various embodiments of the present invention relate to a privacy control-adjustable vehicle monitoring system with a wild card mode.
Vehicle monitoring systems for commercial vehicle drivers as well as passenger vehicle drivers are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. For example, OnStar systems offer cellular signal and satellite signal-based vehicle monitoring and communications between an onboard transceiver device in a vehicle and a vehicle monitoring station. Emergency location tracking of the vehicle, emergency vehicle door unlocks, and subscription fee-based voice navigational guidance via the onboard transceiver device and the vehicle monitoring station are some of the conventional offerings from the OnStar systems and other vehicle-tracking service providers.
Furthermore, parents, commercial vehicle business owners, and other supervisory entities are also becoming more interested in monitoring their vehicles using a computer interface. For example, parents may want to check whereabouts, driving habits, and vehicle safety profiles of their adolescent children by using a computer program executed on a notebook computer that remotely monitors certain data fields and parameters recorded and collected by an onboard vehicle monitoring device. In another example, a supervising entity in a commercial trucking business or a limousine fleet business may want to check whereabouts, driving habits, and vehicle safety profiles of their hired commercial vehicle drivers.
However, some drivers find that the notion that a vehicle-monitoring entity keeps track of what can be considered private and sensitive information, such as the vehicle's speed, the vehicle's past and current locations categorized by time, and other privacy-sensitive information, is a serious violation of civil rights and privacy, as such privacy-sensitive information can be hacked, sold, stolen, or misused by governmental authorities, supervising entities, and even rogue entities. The concern for such privacy violation of drivers is significant in today's vehicle electronic systems, regardless of which the vehicle-monitoring entity is associated with a particular driver (e.g. a monitoring service provider such as OnStar, an employer, parents, or a combination thereof).
The existing solution for avoiding such outright or potential privacy violations is either avoiding vehicles equipped with onboard vehicle monitoring devices, or disabling the onboard vehicle monitoring devices entirely. While service providers (e.g. OnStar) and supervising entities (e.g. employers, parents, and etc.) for onboard vehicle monitoring devices often officially state that all of the sensitive information gathered in real-time by the service providers of onboard vehicle monitoring will remain private and protected, a gross misuse or a leak of privacy-sensitive data to a third party entity over the operational lifecycle of the vehicle is a serious civil rights risk to each driver.
Therefore, it may be desirable to devise a novel privacy control-adjustable vehicle monitoring system that involves an explicit real-time consent from a driver to a vehicle monitoring personnel or a supervising entity to grant or deny access to certain types of datasets collected in an onboard vehicle monitoring device. In addition, it may be desirable to provide a novel dataset categorization for vehicle monitoring systems to separate a “must-disclose” mandatory dataset from a privacy-adjustable dataset for various data fields collected by the onboard vehicle monitoring device for the driver's privacy protection.
Furthermore, it may be desirable to provide one or more flexible user interfaces that enable a driver to grant or deny access to privacy-adjustable datasets whether the driver is currently inside or outside the vehicle. Moreover, it may be also desirable to provide a novel wild card mode that grants a vehicle monitoring personnel or a supervising entity a time-limited and frequency-limited access to currently-private datasets based on an explicit pre-arranged agreement with a driver.